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Reflections - Behind the Scenes with Sarah

As the show begins to switch gears a bit, from talking with authors to talking with artists, theologians, musicians, poets–creatives of all kinds–we take a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned over the years making the show. Sarah talks with Larj Media’s Principle Creative, Tina Nole, to talk about why she began these conversations and the many ways making the Peaceful Exit podcast has impacted her.


This podcast is produced by Larj Media.


Transcript:

Tina: [00:00:00] Welcome to A Peaceful Exit. I am not Sarah Cavanaugh. Hello. My name is Tina Nole and I run Large Media where we are producing this podcast with the illustrious Sarah Cavanaugh today we're doing something very different. You likely already know that because you're hearing my voice first and not Sarah's.

Tina: Today Sarah and I wanted to come together and have a conversation about her experience making this podcast, reading 8 million books, and diving deep into this topic. Sarah, thank you for indulging me in this conversation.

Sarah: Absolutely. I'd say thank you for having

Tina: me, but I've been here

Sarah: a lot. It's

Tina: Absolutely.

Tina: Um, well, I'm really grateful to have had this time and to have gotten this experience with you. So let's start from the beginning because there's not a lot that you share about your personal life in this podcast. You do such a beautiful job of holding space for all of your authors [00:01:00] and guests on the show.

Tina: But we haven't learned a whole lot about you. Are you willing to share some things with me today? Under duress, yes. All right. I promise no podcast hosts are being harmed in the making of this show today. Um, okay. Well, let's start at the top. You and I met a few years ago and you asked me about my grief story.

Tina: We shared a bit about that time, um, about the funeral home that your family ran in Tacoma, Washington, that I got to spend some time with as a kid, oddly, walking around those beautiful grounds. At that time, I learned a little bit about this, but I think people want to know, what is your grief story?

Sarah: Well, what we call in Peaceful Exit our story about death is really, um, we look at like what the first experience of death is in your life, when you're sort of a conscious child.

Sarah: However, my grief story really started before I was born. One of my siblings died prior [00:02:00] to when I was born. And what I've learned through all of these conversations and these incredible books I've read is that that can have an impact on a family's dynamic growing up. And so I was born into grief. And I didn't even find out I had a brother until I was 10 years old.

Tina: And do you remember when you were 10, learning about that or what that was like? I don't,

Sarah: but my older brother remembers it vividly. He was 19 years old and he remembers we were at the family's funeral home and cemetery. And he just leaned over to me and he said, I think we should go see Matthew's grave.

Sarah: And I looked at him and I said, Who's Matthew? And I think in that moment he, as an older sibling, felt responsible for the fact that I didn't know. And certainly it was not his fault that I didn't know, but I had no idea that there was, uh, a fifth child in our family. And so, I don't remember going to visit Matthew's grave.

Sarah: I don't remember the moment that he told me. [00:03:00] Coming back as an adult to remember, like, remembering it, memory is such an interesting thing to me because everyone remembers this experience, I'm sure, very differently. But for me, not knowing as a little one, what was causing, you know, ripples in the force of my family.

Sarah: Um, and now really understanding that it's given me so much. insight and healing.

Tina: Wow. In the podcast, you have talked a lot about how we have relationships with folks after they've passed. Now this is a brother you didn't know, but there is family there, so you kind of do know there's like some stuff in there, right?

Tina: Do you have a relationship with him now?

Sarah: Yeah. In fact, I think I developed a relationship when our first child was born because our first child, Noah, he loved to sleep on his stomach. You know, all these pediatricians were saying, don't let your child sleep on their stomach because of SIDS. And SIDS is [00:04:00] Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Sarah: And that is how Matthew died. And Matthew did not suffocate. But these doctors were telling me, don't, you know, don't let Noah sleep on his face. Which sounded like wise advice. And so I bought these little triangular cushion things to make him sleep on his side. And he was so uncomfortable and it was terrible.

Sarah: He was crying and I was crying and it was awful. And so I called my mom and it was the first time she talked about Matthew with me. And she said, don't worry about it. They have no idea. And every couple of years they changed their advice on how to take care of your baby when they sleep. And, you know, as long as you're not doing something that would cause harm, um, There's really no explanation for SIDS, and I don't know if that's still true.

Sarah: I haven't actually done any research on it now. It was significant then that I found out how he had died, because I felt so strongly a connection with him, and part of that connection is that he was the fourth born. And my [00:05:00] parents wanted four children. So when they lost their fourth born, I was conceived and I was born as the fourth child, but I was, you know, obviously thought I was the fourth child until I was 10 and now I consider myself the fifth child and I'm very, very grateful to Matthew.

Tina: That is so sweet. Your family plays a part in this podcast on many beautiful levels. And throughout this podcast, there is some beautiful music also related to you.

Sarah: When I realized, and I met you and I met your sister and that you had grown up in Tacoma and there was so much synergy, I was like, Oh, I'm going to work with this company.

Sarah: And. I'm going to talk to my brother about doing the music because he has so many beautiful instrumental songs that feel so appropriate for this content. So I called Richard and I said, would you be okay if I used your music for the podcast? And he said, absolutely. And here we are.

Tina: You know, what's [00:06:00] funny is often clients will come and say, I have somebody who can play the music and I go because we're very particular here about how we do that.

Tina: When I heard your brother's music, I was like, Oh, we got so lucky. It's, it's perfect.

Sarah: Oh, I feel so lucky because I grew up with him playing the guitar. And to this day, when I want to relax, I turn on peaceful guitar music.

Tina: Okay, so what has surprised you the most about doing the podcast?

Sarah: Well, I'm not surprised at how brilliant my guests are.

Sarah: I'm not surprised at how brilliant the editor of this podcast is. Yes,

Tina: Kareen Kiltow is quite incredible. You also have the incredible Katie Klein, who is your lead producer on the show. So the team here is all around you, but that's not a surprise.

Sarah: That's not a surprise. What I think surprised me As someone with a hearing disability who's losing their hearing, how much I love this audio medium.

Sarah: And, um, I just fell into it like, I don't know, fish to [00:07:00] water.

Tina: That is really compelling to me that you are losing your hearing is. with us right now and that you're creating this beautiful body of work for people who can hear and luckily we now have the capability of transcribing every episode so we have accessibility to those who may not be able to hear it as well.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that.

Tina: I've heard you say this a lot through talking to your authors and I'd never heard it before and it's this idea that these authors have metabolized their grief. I think I assumed grief was something that starts as acute and raw and just kind of dissipates over time. And in my experience, certainly I've had that kind of cloudy rollercoaster ride with grief, but I've never heard this idea of metabolizing grief.

Tina: Do you remember when you first thought about that? Or where does this come from, this idea?

Sarah: So one of the things I really respect about writers is that they may go through 14 drafts before something comes out in the world. And during that [00:08:00] time, because I write myself, there's a lot of processing that we go through as we're writing.

Sarah: And so, That's what I mean about metabolizing, like you are taking each part of this and you're kind of reliving it in a way, um, and looking at it from a distance. You're almost saying, okay, this happened and this is the description of what happened and how it feels in my body. And how do, how do I get through this?

Sarah: This processing of something that happened that's deeply troubling, deep tragedy, deep loss. And by the time you get to a published book, and I remember Irene Carson said that she put the book out there and then she felt distance from her grief because it was this other thing. Now it's a book, right? So what's interesting to me is really exploring that relationship.

Sarah: between writing and grief, and someday that'll be my second book, not my first one, but it'll be my second book. [00:09:00] But several of my authors have talked about how grief does not dissipate. It doesn't go away. So you're living with a new reality, and you're just living into that new reality. And I think if it's very fresh, it's very difficult to articulate on audio, like, to tell the story, right?

Sarah: Um, and in order to learn from these authors experiences, we can read their book, we can listen to these conversations, we can understand how they have learned to live with grief.

Tina: It's a very different conversation if it has not been metabolized. Is that right? That is right.

Sarah: And which is why I, I shy away from someone who has just had a loss because your body's in shock.

Sarah: You might be able to express the raw emotion, but you haven't really gleaned the lessons learned from that loss. We all live with loss. It's just to what extent we've actually healed from it. And healing doesn't mean it goes away, but [00:10:00] healing means I've learned to live with it. This is what I've learned, and I have done this deeply with Matthew's death.

Sarah: This is what I've learned from a death that I was not even alive for.

Tina: Yeah. Let's talk about the origins of the name of the podcast, Peaceful Exit.

Sarah: I was in a conversation with a small group of women. We were talking to a friend who really wanted to figure out what to do at the end of their lives. And what was forming for me was this imagining of a peaceful exit.

Sarah: And the name hadn't come to me yet, but it was a bit of a stroke of lightning. And it was like, I heard a voice, peaceful exit, and I'm like, oh, that's it. It was just like, it just landed. I can't explain that, but it landed. And then it, and then I shared it with some people and they were like, that's it because we want to imagine our ideal death because we have a much greater chance of reaching that if we've [00:11:00] planned for it and imagined it.

Sarah: If we don't, we're stuck in the fear. We're stuck in the fear of pain. We're stuck in the fear of things going awry. Um, I was speaking with someone the other day, um, who said his greatest fear was that he would die suddenly and his loved ones would be stuck with all his possessions and stuff and the mess in his office, you know, that sort of thing.

Sarah: So I think, um, that name came to me suddenly, but I've been I've understood more and more about what it means by talking to all these wonderful, amazing authors.

Tina: Peaceful Exit is also the name of your course, right? You teach a program about a Peaceful Exit. Who takes the course and what do they learn?

Sarah: So the podcast is really about community.

Sarah: The course is really about you as an individual. Anyone can take the course. I've had people from age 24 to age 99. And it's [00:12:00] now become a celebrated online course that's live. It's live online. Um, but you can tune in from anywhere. And, It's designed to empower you to have some hard conversations. There's a safe space of a small cohort.

Sarah: Um, it's very rare to be in a small group of people that are willing to talk about something so difficult, but in some ways it's easier to talk to a stranger than it is to a family member. And, um, Also, the focus on what you want. This is really important to me personally, because when we were designing the curriculum, it came out of a desire to ask everyone I care about what a peaceful exit means to them.

Sarah: Because my mother never got a chance to express that. I never got a chance to ask her, I didn't even know to ask her, like, what do you want at the end of your life? And I remember one of our participants was a friend of mine who's a palliative care doctor. [00:13:00] And when she took the course, I called her and I said, why did you sign up for this course?

Sarah: And she said, because I do this for everyone else and I've never taken the time to do it for myself. So this is an opportunity to take the time for yourself. It's a 10 week course. It covers all range of subject matter, um, some of the most important spiritual matters of resolving difficult relationships, whether that person's still alive or not.

Sarah: It's about unpacking our story around grief and death. It's about really getting into the deeper subjects beyond the paperwork.

Tina: Okay, you've talked about it earlier. You do have a book on the way. How's it going? And how is it different from the podcast?

Sarah: I'm super excited about the book. I've been writing it for many years, actually, um, since we first started having conversations around Peaceful Exit with our original cohort back in 2018.

Sarah: Um, I found an amazing editor. We've rearranged all the chapters. [00:14:00] Honestly, it's the hardest thing I've ever done. And it's also actually given me a whole lot more respect for the authors that I am talking to, that they went through this process and they completed their books. But I'm excited that it will come out next year, um, in the fall.

Tina: Is it along the same lines as the Peaceful Exit podcast or is it more aligned with your classes?

Sarah: It's more aligned with our classes and the curriculum in the classes. So They say people who want to self navigate this exploration could pick up the book and do it on their own, or they could do it with a book club, or they could do it with their families.

Sarah: But it gives people an opportunity to have the material right in front of them. They don't need to take the course. It's something that, you know, we only offer to about 40 people a year. This is a very small cohort. Um, we do small cohorts of 20 each in fall and winter. And so what I wanted to do was was provide this curriculum to a much larger audience.

Tina: How has your idea of a peaceful exit [00:15:00] changed since you began doing the podcast?

Sarah: Well, I think everything has changed for me.

Tina: Yeah.

Sarah: Uh, I don't think I'd thought about it. I didn't have a language for it. I grew up in a family that didn't talk about grief or loss, and I started talking about it. And so it's, it's a revolution in my life.

Sarah: And I now have a language for it. And I'm now having these conversations kind of everywhere. It's It's one

Tina: thing to have these conversations in private or at parties or, you know, read these books, but there is something magical that happens knowing that other people are hearing your conversation and I wonder how that, how that's been for you.

Sarah: It's been amazing, actually. I called a friend of mine on his birthday. I hadn't talked to him in 10 years. Had no idea he was listening. And he had actually moved home to live with his 98 year old mother and just shared how incredible. These [00:16:00] conversations were moving in his life. And that's what I see is I see that these conversations are universal and that people pick them up when they need to.

Sarah: Um, what I recommend is people kind of just peruse the titles and if something interests them and resonates with them, listen to that one. It's a very eclectic group of books and subjects. That's what excites me as meeting new people. Um, also opening up the conversation about Matthew, which in my family, Matthew was never spoken of.

Sarah: There were no photographs of him. And now we're talking about him. And my sister and I have really connected in a way that I don't think we would have had this subject not come up.

Tina: I want to be clear that this podcast is not going away. This isn't an end. We just wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the show over the last few years, as you open the door for some new things that are on the horizon around expanding into other mediums, artists and musicians, maybe poets, uh, [00:17:00] thespians and things like that.

Tina: So more too shall be revealed in the coming weeks about what's up next for Peaceful Exit. Before we end this particular. episode, are you willing to tell me what a peaceful exit means to you, Sarah Kavanagh?

Sarah: I am still learning what a peaceful exit means to me, but what I imagine, uh, in the many conversations I've had now is that a key element of a peaceful exit is accepting our mortality.

Sarah: And for me, peaceful exit is not just about our physical death. It's also about how we live in the world. How we live fully, how we work for peace. I want to acknowledge that not all exits are peaceful, but the more that we can accept our own mortality, the more that we will treat each other with compassion.

Sarah: Beautifully said. Thank you.

Sarah: Thank you for listening to [00:18:00] Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit. net, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at A Peaceful Exit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Sarah: This episode was produced by the amazing team at Larj Media. You can find them at larjmedia. com. The Peaceful Exit team includes my producer, Katy Klein, and editor, Corine Kuehlthau. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Tina Nole is our senior producer, and Syd Gladu provides additional production and social media support.

Sarah: Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful [00:19:00] Exit.

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